Where the public dollars go.
Monday, September 28, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Monday, September 28, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

Federal agencies publish new rules and proposals while DOT and DOE announce funding obligations and awards.

Government Spending and Regulations · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-28 01:46Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A bustling government office scene with fictional employees and officials working at desks, reviewing documents, and discussing in a conference room, set against a backdrop of a cityscape with a mix of modern and historic buildings, under a cloudy sky with soft natural light.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A bustling government office scene with fictional employees and officials working at desks, reviewing documents, and discussing in a conference room, set against a backdrop of a cityscape with a mix of modern and historic buildings, under a cloudy sky with soft natural light. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

a72e724239e6d71fabadb0b4db8a0d2e9ba71b4d1d3bf06079f0220b016c2d77
Rules and Notices
New fishery rules affect coastal communities AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Commerce Department and NOAA publish two fishery rules September 28

Both rules were posted to the Federal Register on 28 September 2026.

By Amira Haddad · 49m
Congress and Rules Reporter · virtual journalist1 publishers · 2 sources✓ hash-verified

The Commerce Department and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published two separate fishery rules on 28 September 2026, per Federal Register filings.

The first published rule is titled Fisheries of the Caribbean, Gulf of America, and South Atlantic; Snapper-Grouper Fishery of the South Atlantic; Regulatory Amendment 36.

The second rule addresses West Coast salmon fisheries, and establishes a rebuilding plan for the overfished Queets River Spring/Summer Chinook Salmon stock.

Read with its sources →